ABOVE: “Aloha Sunset Land,” a 1949 recording from the Michael Scott collection, now at the archives.
The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco was a watershed moment for Hawaiian music. The expo stretched out for more than two miles along the city's waterfront and attracted nearly nineteen million visitors over ten months. People from all around the country and the world gathered to experience the latest in technology, art and entertainment. John Philip Sousa's marching band paraded through the streets; French composer Camille Saint-Saens conducted his orchestra in the festival hall. But by many accounts the surprise hit of the expo was found inside the comparatively humble Hawaiian Pavilion, where the Kailimai Hawaiian Quintet and other Hawaiian performers strummed ukulele and guitars, singing soon-to-become-classic tunes like Queen Liliuokalani's "Aloha Oe" and Henry Kailimai's "On the Beach at Waikiki" to crowds that sometimes exceeded thirty thousand people per day.
Kailimai and other musicians and dancers throughout the expo—including Joseph Kekuku, who invented Hawaiian lap steel guitar—helped spark an explosion in the popularity of Hawaiian music. By the end of 1916, just one year after the expo closed, Hawaiian music had become the best-selling genre in North America. Hawaiian singers, dancers, songwriters and musicians were thriving. Recordings of their heartfelt musical performances were "cut" onto cylinders or discs made of wax and cellulose, which were used as masters for printing commercial products on plastic or shellac. Fans nationwide snapped up discs and cylinders to play on hand-cranked Edison phonographs and 78-rpm gramophones (the predecessor to modern turntables) with bulbous horns. A massive amount of Hawaiian music was produced and distributed to Island-obsessed listeners across the country.
Over the next hundred years, Hawaiian music and instruments like ukulele and steel guitar made a huge contribution to many other musical styles; in fact, the electric guitar was invented in 1931 to amplify the sound of a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. But most of those physical recordings, bits of plastic and shellac from a golden era of Hawaiian music that lasted from around 1915 to the mid-1900s, were lost to the ages as new trends, formats and styles emerged to take their place. The Hawaiian artists of the early twentieth century faded from the limelight, but what happened to all those recordings?
"We believe we now have the largest collection of recorded Hawaiian music in the world," says Hawaii State Archivist Adam Jansen. Colorful and energetic, Jansen beams with near-childlike delight as he welcomes me in to see what's cooking inside the boxy white building hidden in the shade behind Iolani Palace. In 2021, after a few years of behind-the-scenes effort, Jansen and his team received two gigantic donations of Hawaiian music within a week of each other, each comprising around ten thousand records. The Hawaii State Archives now hold more than twenty-five thousand recordings of Hawaiian music on discs and cylinders dating back to some of the earliest known samples. But "please don't call them 'records,'" Jansen jokingly admonishes. For archivists the term "records" can mean nearly anything: books, letters, photos, sheet music. "Everything is a record. The discs that play music are what we like to refer to as 'phonographic records.'"
An authentic 1912 Edison phonograph at the Hawaii State Archives.
Phonographic or otherwise, the archives are home to a huge assortment of all types of records, including historical documents, musical instruments, handwritten letters and manuscripts. It's like a memento drawer on steroids. They're even safeguarding moon rocks returned by the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions, along with a Hawaiian flag that went with the astronauts to the lunar surface (and, remarkably, the US Customs forms that the crews had to fill out when coming back into the country from their out-of-this-world trips). But the phonographic recordings are currently in the spotlight, and they're likely to remain so as the archives proceed with an ambitious, multiyear effort to digitize all of them and make them available online for free.
Past the reception area is the archives' main space, a large room full of tables, shelves and equipment where various staff and volunteers go about their work. What seems initially like a drab government office is revealed to be more like a secret magical workshop, part library, part museum and part research lab filled with wondrous gizmos. Musical antiquities share the space with ultramodern audio equipment, computers, oscilloscopes and speakers. And boxes and boxes and even more boxes of phonographic records. Front and center is a majestic original 1912 Edison Concert cylinder player, with its grandiose horn. "Excuse me, everyone," Jansen declares to the staff, volunteers and visitors present as he carefully guides an antique cylinder onto the phonograph's horizontal spindle. "I'm going to make a little bit of noise, but hopefully you'll enjoy it." He winds the hand crank and sets the cylinder spinning. The warbling tones of ukulele and steel guitar from more than a century ago fill the room. "It's a 1915 recording of Aloha Oe,'" Jansen says, full of admiration. "So it's Queen Liliuokalani's music, recorded during the queen's lifetime. And this is how she would have heard it played back to her, through this type of equipment." Jansen is devoted to ensuring that future generations will hear it as well, albeit through an entirely different audio experience.
On the other side of the room, state-of-the-art devices digitize these antique analog recordings at the highest possible quality. Jansen's been on research trips to the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, DC, comparing notes with other archivists and audio restoration experts to implement the most effective processes and obtain the best equipment for Hawaii's music digitization project. First, the cylinders are carefully hand-cleaned, while the discs are run through a gauntlet of hand- and machine-based cleaning processes. There's the Keith Monks Record Cleaning Machine, which does exactly what its name suggests, using brushes and vacuums to remove surface grime and dust. Then the discs go into a specialized "degritter" to rid them of, well, grit by submerging the sound grooves in fluid and creating air cavitations with ultrasonic vibration to lift away microscopic bits of dirt.
The archives’ now massive music collection includes recordings in multiple formats. Here, state archivist Adam Jansen loads a reel-to-reel tape.
When the phonographic records are clean and ready for their moment under the needle, it's onto the Rek-O-Kut Trovatore turntable, an impressive industrial beast with an eight-pound platter that ensures smooth and consistent spinning. "This is an archival-quality turntable, not something you'd find in somebody's house," Jansen says. "It's a unique, specialized piece of equipment." The recordings go through a litany of processors, equalizers, noise filters and more to capture the cleanest possible reproductions for digitization. If the exuberant Jansen is a bit like Willy Wonka, the digitization station and its various contraptions are the heart of his sonic chocolate factory.
"We always make two versions," says Jesse Shiroma, an archivist specializing in audio digitization. "One is the raw track. That is exactly what's on the disc with no equalization, going straight from the grooves to the needle to the digits." He flips a switch and the speakers play back the digital copy of a lively musical performance from nearly ninety years ago. The hissing background noise is what most old phonograph records have in common, no matter the song. "It's kind of crackly and tinny, but that's what you get on the original recording from 1936," Shiroma explains as he tweaks the knobs on his high-tech digital audio workstation. He flips the switch back and suddenly the track sounds clear. "This other track is our balanced track that's run through the equalization to dampen the highs, bring up the lows, get rid of a lot of those clicks and pops and create a more realistic representation of the original performance."
Drawing on his own background as a musician and songwriter (he's a lifelong accordionist and percussionist whose former band, Streetlight Cadence, won two Na Hoku Hanohano Awards, a.k.a. the Hawaiian Grammys), Shiroma relishes the task of cleaning up old tracks while keeping the raw tracks in their pure form for researchers and historians. "I started off here as a volunteer because it seemed like such an incredible opportunity to work with some of the earliest professional recordings of Hawaiian music. The fact that all of this is available to the public is just kind of mind-boggling. These recordings are things I thought would be locked away in a vault or in some private collection, never to be heard by the public. But it's all here, it's all available and it's almost overwhelming."
The generosity of a multitude of donors and volunteers has made the digitization project possible. It all started with the late Harry B. Soria Jr., a well-known local radio host from a family of broadcasters. Soria's Territorial Airwaves program aired vintage Hawaiian music weekly in Honolulu for forty years. Several years before Soria passed away in 2021, he had begun searching for an institution to inherit his enormous collection of more than ten thousand Hawaiian music recordings and memorabilia. "His only condition was that we had to make it all available to the public for free," Jansen says. "He really wanted to share his love of Hawaiian music with everybody."
A small portion of the Harry B. Soria collection.
While talks with Soria and his family were ongoing, Jansen got a call from the estate of Michael Alan Scott, another major collector. Scott was a musician in Canada who had developed a love for Hawaiian steel guitar years earlier. He had formed a Hawaiian music group of his own in Toronto and released several recordings. Throughout his lifetime Scott also collected more than ten thousand recordings of Hawaiian steel guitar-inspired music, and when he passed away in 2020, his will directed that the collection be donated to an institution that would maintain it in perpetuity and make it publicly accessible. In September 2021, Jansen had just finalized the arrangements with Scott's estate and had another conversation with Soria. "Uncle Harry decided he wanted us to have it," Jansen recalls. "So he signed off on the Soria donation just before I flew out to Toronto to pack up and bring back all of the Scott collection." In the span of a few days, the Hawaii State Archives had inherited two of the largest collections of Hawaiian music recordings in the world.
The Scott and Soria acquisitions left little doubt for other collectors that the archives were the right place for Hawaiian music and related memorabilia. "I've had a lot of people come up and say, 'If it's good enough for Uncle Harry, it's good enough for me. Please take all my records and add them to your collection,'" Jansen says. In 2023 the archives acquired thousands more recordings from T. Malcolm Rockwell, a Maui collector and author of Hawaiian & Hawaiian Guitar Records 1891-1960, an exhaustive discography of Hawaiian musicians. In 2024 the archives licensed Rockwell's 1,500-page discography, providing the digitization team with cross-references for most of the digitized recordings so that metadata can be incorporated with the digital files, enabling future researchers to find specific songwriters, performers, recording sessions and instruments.
"We're taking time and being careful to do it right," says Jansen of organizing and preserving the music and related data, which will be released incrementally over time at digitalarchives.hawaii.govOpens external link to page that may not meet accessibility guidelines, as each item must clear any copyright or other restrictions prior to digital release. "But eventually, all of this—the recordings, songbooks, sheet music, lyrics, photos of performers—we'll get it all online and cross-indexed so anybody anywhere can search for, learn about and enjoy these amazing collections."
Archivist Jesse Shiroma turns analog recordings into clean, digital files for upload. “We want to get the finest copy that we can so that when the public listens to it, it’s something they enjoy, that they’re proud of,” says Jansen. “Because it belongs to them. We’re the public archives—everything we hold, we hold on behalf of the people of Hawaii.”
Although they haven't yet completed even a full inventory of all of the items, Jansen's team has already uncovered a number of special pieces. "The oldest recording we've found so far is from 1903, which is incredibly early. And there are rarities from international artists who were so enamored with Hawaiian music and instruments that they wrote and recorded their own Hawaii-inspired songs." With all of that material to go through, the project is expected to take quite a while. "Decades!" Jansen exclaims. "Because that's the nature of phonographic records. You have to listen to them in real time, you know. We can't expedite the process. So it really depends on how many volunteers we have." Other than archive staff, the operation relies on the public to help out. "Unfortunately for them, they have to sit here and actually listen to the finest collection of Hawaiian music in the world," Jansen jokes.
As I listen to more melodies wafting from the ancient Edison phonograph's ornate, electricity-free loudspeaker, I wonder what it might have been like to wander past that Hawaiian Pavilion more than a century ago in San Francisco. To be drawn in and witness the performance, seduced by the sound of ukulele and leo kiekie (falsetto singing). "We want to make all of these recordings globally accessible," Jansen tells me in parting, with a hint of solicitation. He is, after all, constantly seeking more volunteers. "One can argue that the recordings are meant to be heard, not just preserved. Just because they're no longer in circulation doesn't mean that the music should ever stop."
If you wish to volunteer or have material to donate, contact the Hawaii State Archives at musicarchives@hawaii.govOpens external link to page that may not meet accessibility guidelines
